Read the passage from "Pie Diary".
I pasted a recipe clipped from a library cookbook (don’t tell!) into my pie diary and got to work. And that’s how I ended up in the kitchen with cherry pie filling burning my shins, my daytime babysitter shoveling a red mound off the floor with a spatula. I was a week out from baking the real thing, and my latest test run was in pieces—and not neatly sliced pieces.
Use the words "quantity" and "preference" in this response
In 1-2 sentences, explain the denotation of the word "pieces" (highlighted in red) and its connotation in this passage.